“Only television can build common discourses”: Why Chile’s TVN needs reviving

19 de junio de 2025

Por Lorena Antezana

Since TVN was born, around 1970, it was linked to the State. In fact, what existed previously [also] had this State oversight. And the media, and TVN became a channel that was directly associated with the government in power.

But this happened with the rest of the channels as well. During that period, the University of Chile channel – which is currently a private television channel – was closed. There was oversight through someone appointed who began to carry out a review process – that is, censorship of what was broadcast on television on the other channels.

For all these reasons, television throughout the dictatorship was generally considered a less credible medium, and this gave rise to many other alternative media outlets that tried to tell what television wasn’t telling. In other words, these posters that appear in Chile from time to time – the latest, due to the social uprising – that “television lies”, are already supported by all the protests regarding what television wasn’t showing at that time.

Furthermore, before Pinochet left, the latest laws regarding the media were modified, allowing private media outlets to emerge, and that’s how Mega, for example, emerged, which is today the channel that somehow leads the way because it’s the only one in the black.

Shaking the image of a “lying television”

All the other channels were in crisis or making losses, and national television was the one most associated with that. In a democracy, then, national television will try to somehow shed this burden that had been placed on it: being a “lying television”, if you will, or one that defended the interests of the dictatorship and that operated somewhat under its wing.

One of the strategies it developed was to change its programming and its approach. And in fact, in this transformation process, telenovelas played a very important role and were a hook that somehow brings families back together and were a bridge for support, for entertainment. And so the national television station took on a role in a somewhat uncomfortable space, because it’s supposed to be the only public medium, the only public television that exists, but it also had to be self-financed like the rest of the channels. And it also had some obstacles in its operation, because it had a rather political board of directors, which also decided what function, what programmes, and what this public television, so to speak, should do.

The telenovela, in the Chilean case, has always been a programme that draws audiences. That is, the telenovela that won a certain semester drew viewers to its television newscast.

What happens with television, with TVN or this public channel, is what happens in almost all spaces in Chile. We don’t have public media, just as we don’t have public universities. In other words, everything works according to the logic of self-financing. And so it has this dual responsibility, if you will, of being a medium that has to respond commercially, but it also has to be a medium with a public character, with a public mission, or with a logic that somehow tries to build what should be public in this spectrum. All channels are going to suffer several crises from 2000 onward.

The boom and peak period of the channels, especially Televisión Nacional de Chile and Channel 13, lasted until the beginning of the 2000s. And then a whole series of technological and offering transformations came along that increasingly changed this landscape. And the main transformation was the emergence of streaming platforms. And public television was not able to read the different moments, something that, for example, Mega, a much smaller channel with not much impact, did much better.https://www.publicmediaalliance.org/why-chiles-tvn-needs-reviving/